The Shell Scott series by Richard S. Prather is one of my all-time favorite private eye series. I read nearly all of them when I was in junior high and high school and thoroughly enjoyed them. Recently, Wolfpack Publishing got the rights to reprint them and is reissuing the series in omnibus volumes. I just reread the first published (but not first written) novel, CASE OF THE VANISHING BEAUTY, for the first time in more than 50 years.
This one involves a beautiful blond client who hires Shell to have dinner with her, hints that something sinister is going on, but won’t give him the whole story; the client’s beautiful younger sister, who turns out to be missing (the “vanishing beauty” of the title); the beautiful target in a knife-throwing nightclub act (are you sensing a theme here?); a religious cult like so many others that show up in California-set private eye novels; and assorted gangsters and con-men, plus Shell’s police detective buddy Phil Samson.
Prather hadn’t quite hit his stride yet in the early novels, and that shows in a rather thin plot with few real surprises in it. But there’s plenty of snappy patter, some nice action scenes, and Shell himself, one of the most likable narrator/protagonists in the entire genre. For years I had a rule about not rereading books, but the older I get, the more I enjoy revisiting old favorites from time to time. I enjoyed CASE OF THE VANISHING BEAUTY. Prather’s prose is just fun to read. I’m sure I’ll be rereading more of the Shell Scott series.
2 comments:
I was VERY excited when I saw the title of this post and then reading it. I went to Amazon in a lather only to find out that they are ebooks. No Bueno.
I want these in stories in editions that I can keep and hold onto.
Maybe someday.
Sometimes Wolfpack will do print editions of the individual books after the omnibus e-book editions come out. I don't know that that's the case with these, but it seems possible. It would be nice to have uniform, affordable print editions of the whole series.
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